San Jose: Jury finds man guilty of threatening his lawyer

SAN JOSE -- Resolving an unusual case in record time, a jury took a scant four hours to find a man guilty Friday of threatening his own lawyer -- even though the attorney had retracted his initial accusation against his client.

Ernesto Mirabal, 39, sobbed in apparent shock as the clerk read the verdict: guilty of one felony count of making criminal threats for slamming his lawyer Andy Tursi's head into a jail wall in 2010 and threatening to "do him."

However, the panel found the allegation that Mirabal had used a deadly weapon -- the wall -- "not true."

The legal battle generated keen interest because it is so unusual for a defense attorney to implicate his client in a crime -- and rarer still for that attorney to then turn around and claim the man is actually innocent.

The jury had to sift through three conflicting versions of what happened in a tiny interview room at the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose about 2½ years ago. They chose the lawyer's initial account of his terror over the clash with his client, rather than his later retraction and the defendant's own self-serving tale.

Mirabal faces a maximum of 11 years in prison if Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Philip Pennypacker rules later this spring that an armed robbery he committed in Idaho about two decades ago counts as a first strike under California law.

The seven men and five women on the jury declined to comment. The trial pitted two articulate, well-prepared lawyers against each other -- defense attorney﻿ Dennis Lempert and prosecutor Jim Leonard -- who battled for more than two weeks.

Advertisement

Mirabal was initially charged in 2008, principally with pimping a 13-year-old female runaway out of a Motel 6 via Craigslist. He picked up new charges -- trying to hire a former Nuestra Familia gang member to prevent the teen witness from testifying against him -- and it is that separate case that was being tried during the alleged client-lawyer attack in 2010.

After nine days of testimony in that trial, Tursi reported the clash with Mirabal to Judge Rise Jones Pichon in a one-on-one session, never meant to be shared with anyone else. The lawyer and his client had been arguing over legal strategy.

"I'm showing you my left arm now, where these marks are. This is one of the places he grabbed ahold of me," he said in the closed session. "I just can't be afraid for my safety every moment I'm in the room with this person."

So Pichon took the dramatic step of declaring a mistrial. Upset about what they viewed as obstruction of justice, prosecutors filed new, separate criminal-threat charges against Mirabal after succeeding in getting the transcript unsealed.

But Tursi then changed his story, saying that when he and Mirabal confronted each other at fairly close range, they both "kind of veered off to the left and bada-boom," and the lawyer fell against the wall.

Leonard likened Tursi's apparent change of heart to the way victims of domestic violence often minimize the abuse by the time their cases get to trial. Tursi's original story is corroborated by a clerk the attorney worked with on the trial, who said she believed Tursi was genuinely scared.

Some of Tursi's colleagues say his story may have changed because the trial put him in an excruciatingly tough position -- because the duty of a criminal defense lawyer is to provide a vigorous defense, not get a client in deeper trouble. Others say Tursi could also have been worried that his livelihood could be in jeopardy if word got out that he testified against his own client.

The jury also heard a third version of events.

Mirabal testified he never manhandled or threatened Tursi. He said he gave him an ultimatum: Either "get with the program" vis-a-vis trial strategy or he would tell the judge the damaging things he knew about the lawyer. Mirabal claims that Tursi "disrespected" his family, violated the confidentiality of other clients by talking about their cases and told him to "stop acting like a (racial slur about African-Americans)."

But Leonard noted that Mirabal had filed two separate unsuccessful motions asking the judge to fire Tursi, who had been appointed to represent him because he couldn't afford a private lawyer. Mirabal was facing decades in prison if he had been convicted, and Leonard suggested that he would likely have used the damaging information against him then if his story were true.

Mirabal still faces 11 charges, including lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 (the teenage runaway whose services he allegedly sold over the Web).